Google is launching MVP, a refrigerator-sized satellite carrying four of its Tensor Processing Units, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 as part of the Transporter-18 rideshare mission, months ahead of the original early-2027 target. Built in partnership with Planet Labs, the satellite's solar panels generate only about one kilowatt, and the mission is primarily about stress-testing hardware, checking how the TPUs handle launch vibration and acceleration (50-100x gravity), radiation, and thermal extremes rather than doing anything computationally useful.
arstechnica.com·4 min read
AMD shares jumped 9.6% to a record $613.31 on Monday, pushing its market cap above $1 trillion for the first time and making it the fourth US chipmaker to cross the threshold, after Nvidia, Broadcom, and Micron. The stock has gained roughly 185% in 2026, far outpacing the Nasdaq's 15.8%, as AMD increasingly positions itself as a full AI computing infrastructure competitor to Nvidia, selling complete systems combining processors, networking equipment, and related hardware rather than standalone accelerator chips.
links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read
Factories installed 603,000 industrial robots worldwide in 2025. China accounted for 354,000. The global installed base passed five million, showing how concentrated the latest wave of factory automation has become.
LTT Labs measured the A20 Pro at 55% above the iPhone 17 Pro's A19 Pro in one 3DMark graphics test. Its broader review also tests sustained performance, display brightness, charging, and battery life.
Legged robots burn energy differently than wheeled ones, constantly working at the joints just to hold body weight up and losing kinetic energy every time a foot strikes the ground, so KAIST's team built RAIBO2 by comprehensively modeling every source of energy loss instead of optimizing pieces in isolation. The gains came from stacking hardware and software fixes: an optimized mechanical structure, a redesigned motor driver circuit that cuts electrical losses in the power-control stage, and a locomotion policy trained via RL specifically to minimize energy dissipation.
Fault-tolerant quantum computers need a classical decoder to keep pace with error-correction cycles in real time, or a backlog builds that slows the whole computation exponentially. IonQ researchers showed a decoder running on just twelve cores of an Apple M4 Max MacBook Pro chip could keep pace with a simulated 408-logical-qubit trapped-ion machine, using two sliding-window decoders per code block, a slower, highly accurate one tracking corrections for the whole computation, and a faster one handling time-critical logical measurements.
postquantum.com·6 min read
Dexterous manipulation needs both long-term foresight and fast reactive control, but existing models tend to be good at only one, so LiMA decouples the two into an asynchronous dual-system hierarchy: a slow system handles sparse long-horizon intent, a fast system handles dense high-frequency motion, bridged by a Latent Schrödinger Bridge Coupling mechanism that treats aligning the two as a probabilistic transport process rather than a direct mapping. This cuts inference latency by 45.8% versus Cosmos-Policy, and across six bimanual manipulation tasks, LiMA hit a 70.8% overall success rate while holding up on scenarios it wasn't trained on.
Semiconductor design spans dozens of specialized tools - RTL, synthesis, place-and-route, timing sign-off, and DFT - each written by a different vendor with different assumptions about what "done" means. Every handoff between tools risks silently losing design intent, a problem serious enough that first-time silicon success has fallen sharply, with most respins still traced to these intent-transfer failures rather than raw errors. The consensus emerging is "evidence-driven automation": AI can propose fixes, extract properties, and orchestrate handoffs between agents, but every output has to remain independently checkable through formal proof, deterministic verification, and audit trails, since an AI-generated assertion is a hypothesis, not proof, until it's checked against a real engine.
semiengineering.com·7 min read